Modern postal services, for example, the U.S. Postal Service, handle massive volumes of mail pieces on a daily basis. Machines for receiving and sorting these massive volumes of letter mail are known. Typically, such machines are adapted to receive large volumes of flat articles and sort the articles into a plurality of pockets or bins based upon selected criteria. In the case of letter mail, the criteria is associated with the destination of the individual mail pieces which may be an indicia such as a Zip+4 destination code. Typically, such sorting machines have a feeding station, sensing and detecting equipment for determining the appropriate output compartment or pocket for the article to be sorted and diverting gates or other mechanisms for selectively diverting articles to selected ones of an array of output compartments or pockets for the sorted articles. An example of an advanced sorting machine is the DBSCII sorting device, available from Siemens ElectroCom, L. P., Arlington, Tex.
The feeding and sorting of articles by a mail sorter to a pocket normally continues until the pocket become sufficiently full of a stack of sorted articles or mail. When the pocket or receiving compartment is full, an operator manually removes a stack of the sorted articles from the pocket and places the stack of articles into a box. This removal of stacked articles is typically referred to as “sweeping” the compartment or pocket. The stack of sorted articles placed by the operator into a box may be further reprocessed through the same sorting machine, may be transferred to another sorting machine for additional sorting or may be transported to a delivery person, such as a mail carrier, or may be transmitted for ultimate delivery to the intended location, address or recipient when all desired sorting is completed.
Although automatic sorting machines have greatly speeded and improved prior processes for manual article sorting, sweeping and retrieving the sorted and stacked articles from the output pockets of the sorting machine is still a manual operation. The need for such manual sweeping is undesirable for ergonomic reasons because of the bending and reaching required of humans to perform these tasks. Furthermore, the need for such manual handling of mail articles tends to limit the maximum benefits of automation that can be gained from the automatic sorting machines.
Thus there exists a need for a mechanized sweeping method and apparatus to alleviate the shortcomings of manual sweeping.